


Fragments on Impulse

by atlanticslide



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-21
Updated: 2011-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-27 16:54:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/298000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atlanticslide/pseuds/atlanticslide
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dick’s father used to say that impulse was the instrument of fools.  Lewis Nixon is a man guided by impulse, but he’s far from a fool, and it’s that contradiction that Dick catches on first in the other man.  It intrigues him, but he doesn’t really stop to consider why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fragments on Impulse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Destina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Destina/gifts).



Dick’s father used to say that impulse was an instrument of fools.

Lewis Nixon is a man guided by impulse, but he’s far from a fool, and it’s that contradiction that Dick catches on first in the other man. It intrigues him, but he doesn’t really stop to consider why. He likes Nix well enough as he is, despite how vastly different he is from what Dick is used to.

-

A shrug and a half-smiling quip of “I want to serve my country and I have a rendezvous with destiny” is his reply when Dick asks, early into their first meeting, why Nixon had joined the Army. It’s a lightly sarcastic repetition of the recruitment pitch, and it makes Dick laugh a little, to which Nixon smiles bigger in response.

“What about you,” Nixon asks with all the politeness he seems able to muster at this early hour. “Why’d you join up? You have a daredevil streak in you under that farmboy exterior?”

Dick laughs at that and shakes his head a bit. “Yeah. Yeah, that must’ve been it.”

Nixon’s laugh is a pleasant sound in Dick’s ears.

-

“Besides, it’s not like she’d really want to make the trip all the way down here just for a couple’a days anyway.” Nix shrugs and scratches the back of his neck, follows Dick out the mess hall door. “She doesn’t drive, and she hates the train.”

“Nix, why on earth did you ever get married?” Dick asks him, the question always on the tip of his mind when he asks after Nix’s wife.

Nix throws up his hands, like maybe he has no idea either, and says, “Who the hell knows? It’s what you do, right, when you’ve been together a while?” He falls into step beside Dick and jostles their shoulders together and Dick doesn’t chide him for the light swearing. “Rather spend my weekend with a pale, skinny redhead anyway, so that probably says something about the relationship,” he continues, and Dick throws him a glace but doesn’t reply as they head off into town.

-

Dick checks his footlocker before it gets loaded onto the steamer and, lo and behold, there’s a case of Vat 69 tucked in between Dick’s underwear and a stack of socks.

“A few pairs of your socks are in my duffle,” Lew says as he and Harry wander by. “Had to make some room.”

Dick raises his eyebrows, looks over to Harry. Harry just grins at him like he knows something Dick doesn’t and follows Lew off towards the ship’s deck.

Dick slides the clothes back into place before closing the trunk and shoving it back into the pile of luggage to be loaded, caught somewhere between amusement and fear for his friend.

-

They don’t say goodbye.

Dick shakes Harry’s hand – shakes everyone’s hand, in fact, a last act of encouragement and solidarity and unsaid _good luck_ and _I’m honored to have known you_ \- and Harry claps him on the shoulder, giving him a tight smile.

“You take care, Dick,” Harry tells him, as if they’re graduating from college or going off on summer vacations. “See you soon.”

“You too Harry.” Dick tries to sound warm, friendly, and he squeezes Harry’s hand on impulse. Harry squeezes back.

Dick turns to Lew after Harry troops off towards his plane. Lew is busying himself with his chute strap, buckling and unbuckling it unnecessarily and not looking up at Dick.

“Well,” Dick says after a moment. Lew looks up at him then.

“Well,” he mimics back to Dick.

Dick would probably do something embarrassing like grab Lew and hug him, if not for all the gear they’re both wearing. Lew looks at him like he knows it though, with a small quirk to the corner of his mouth, so that’s something.

Dick wants to make a joke about rendezvousing with destiny, but the words die on his tongue before he can get them out.

“Still got that daredevil in you?” Lew asks as he straightens his straps again.

Dick cocks his head a bit, aiming for casual. “’Course I do,” he replies, and Lew grins, punches Dick lightly in the shoulder.

They’ll come back. Dick’s certain of it.

They don’t say much else for a minute or two. They look at each other and glance around at the other men milling about, heading off in this direction and that towards planes and then sky and then war. Lew looks back to Dick and ducks his head a bit.

“I’ll see ya, Dick,” he says and then turns to walk away.

“See you, Lew,” Dick calls after him.

-

The rush of relief Dick feels at seeing Lew perched atop a tank like he owns the thing (and Lew would probably protest that of course he owns it, didn’t you know?) is unexpectedly intense, and all he can do is smile crookedly and then press his hip into Lew’s after he climbs up to sit next to the man.

Dick can feel Lew push his shoulder into Dick’s, an indication, somehow, of his relief as well.

“Good to see you,” Lew says, and the _alive_ goes unspoken.

-

Lew gets spectacularly drunk. Dick takes the opportunity to check Lew’s forehead – then his hairline, then the back of his head, then his ears – for injury again and again. He looks for a bullet that he knows isn’t there, looks for bullet fragments, for pieces of Lew’s helmet, for bruises or blood or scratches, moving Lew’s head back and forth and side to side, and Lew lets him all the while. He leans into Dick and breathes the heavy scent of whiskey onto Dick’s face and mumbles quiet words that Dick doesn’t bother to decipher.

He finds no injury other than a red splotch blossoming into a light bruise just above Lew’s temple. Dick touches it carefully – testing it, maybe, though he’s not even really sure why – and Lew flinches away, glares at Dick before taking another sip of whiskey. Dick takes the flask from him, tucks it into his own breast pocket, and Lew lets him, moving instead to lean more heavily against Dick’s side.

“You’re alright, Nix,” Dick tells him, tempting fate to pat him awkwardly on the head.

“Yup,” Lew replies, looking like he actually might be.

Dick counts it as a win, all things considered.

-

Dick never really questions why he keeps storing Lew’s liquor for him, lugging it across Europe along with his well-worn underwear and an extra pair of slacks. Lew doesn’t question it either, really – he keeps several pairs of Dick’s socks for him, doles them out before Dick even has the chance to complain about his current pair getting a little too rank, and Dick carts around Lew’s whiskey, handing it over somewhat reluctantly whenever Lew comes looking, empty flask in hand. Dick wonders, occasionally, where Lew hides his whiskey when he’s back home.

Lew makes what almost sounds like a sincere declaration of quitting his drinking, and Dick lets himself hope that it’s truth for all of a second before Lew takes another swig.

-

“Easy’s gonna do fine without you, y’know.” Lew nudges Dick with his shoulder, offers Dick his flask. Dick takes it from him just to have something to do with his hands. And to keep the flask out of Lew’s just for a moment.

“Yeah,” Dick replies non-committedly.

“You’ve done well with ‘em,” Lew tries again. He looks Dick full in the eye. It makes Dick swallow heavily. “Trained ‘em great. They’ll be okay.”

“You saying they don’t even need me?” Dick asks, a bad attempt at levity. It makes Lew smile nonetheless.

“Well,” Lew is all bolstering smile now. “Who wouldn’t want Captain Richard Winters, of Podunk Smalltown, Pennsylvania leading them into battle?”

“Lancaster,” Dick corrects automatically and without malice. “Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is that so hard to remember? But,” he adds before Lew can think of a quip to respond with. “Guess it serves me right – there’s no way I can ever keep track of where exactly you’re from.”

Lew takes his flask back and says, “Me neither,” as he takes a sip from it.

Dick keeps half his mind on Easy and half on Lew and he supposes that’s the best he can really hope for.

-

“I, personally, am heading back to Aldbourne to look up a certain young lady.”

Dick doesn’t ask _what about your wife?_ and doesn’t ask if Lew might want to come to Paris with him instead, even though the request is burning in his chest.

The moment passes him by, and he spends a weekend in Paris thinking too much and on the verge of loneliness.

-

“I’m serious Lew.” Dick blows into his cupped hands, but can’t feel any warmth. He’s not very successful at keeping his voice from shaking. “G-go back to Command. Get a h… a hot meal. Shmoo-ooze with the brass for a b-bit.”

Lew shrugs mildly. “I like the cold,” he says slowly. He’s not stuttering in his shivering cold quite as badly as Dick is, but it takes him twice as long to get out a sentence lately as it did a month ago, and he’s not even drunk this evening. “Puts hair on your chest.”

Dick snorts at that, watching as the puff of breath wafts, thick, through the air. “M-makes your… testicles shrivel is what it doe-does.”

Lew’s eyes light up at that. “Am I going nuts from the cold, or did Captain Dick Winters just make a dirty joke?”

Dick smiles and hugs his arms around his chest tightly. “I’m not really an expert of course, b-but I don’t think that really counts as a d-dirty joke.”

“Yeah,” Lew drawls out slowly. The pale of his skin makes the hair at his forehead look even darker than usual. “Probably doesn’t really count as a dirty joke unless there’s at least one naked woman in it. For you, though,” he pauses, and concern gnaws at Dick’s stomach. “’s like saying… saying… Christ, I can’t even remember where I was going with that, I’m so damn cold.”

“Nix,” Dick says, trying to sound stern.

“Dick,” Lew says back to him, and doesn’t move from his spot. He passes Dick another cup of watered-down coffee.

Dick takes the coffee and then shuffles over to budge up next to Lew. He’s pretty sure he can feel Lew’s warmth through their thin jackets.

-

Lew’s the one who acts on a whim. He’s the one who got married for no particular reason except that he was going off to train for war. He’s the one who sneaks whiskey into Dick’s duffle without asking, just assuming (correctly, as it happens) that Dick won’t say anything. He’s the one who won’t leave the foxhole next to Dick’s even though Lew doesn’t actually need to be out here with the Company.

But it’s Dick who leans forward on this night, ostensibly to crowd into Lew’s space for warmth once again, and instead – without the good sense of forethought and quick, careful planning that usually controls Dick’s mind – presses his mouth against Lew’s.

Dick feels cold, chapped lips against his own, unmoving. Both are frozen in place, and it’s almost not even a metaphor. Dick’s hand, somehow, is on Lew’s arm, clutching just above his elbow, and he can feel Lew’s muscles jumping – from the cold, from the adrenaline, from the shock of Dick’s kiss, Dick isn’t sure, but he grips Lew’s arm tighter in any case.

Dick pulls back, finally, after what feels like a millennia, and the look on Lew’s face is almost comical – _would_ be comical if Dick wasn’t so suddenly terrified at what he’s just done. Lew is wide-eyed, startled; he’s not moving away from Dick, which is a plus, but his mouth is gaped open like a fish. Dick doesn’t laugh at him.

“Uh…” he says instead, backing slowly away from Lew.

Lew gropes out for him, lands a hand on Dick’s knee. His lips purse, look like he’s going to ask something starting with _what_ and Dick stops him before he can get even a syllable out.

“I’m not really sure, to be quite honest.” Dick speaks without stuttering for the first time in a week.

Lew nods as if that makes perfect sense and Dick realizes, quite suddenly, that Lew’s thumb is stroking the side of his knee back and forth. He wonders if Lew even realizes what he’s doing.

“Well,” Lew says after a moment. Dick is still marveling at the fact that Lew hasn’t gone running for the German line. “This _is_ a surprise – not the, uh, the kiss,” he adds quickly, not quite meeting Dick’s eyes as he says _kiss_. “You doing something without thinking about it from every angle first. That’s not the Dick Winters I know.”

He almost looks like he’s smiling, but it might be the cold. He might be wincing. Dick chooses to believe it’s a smile, though. He moves back to sit next to Lew once more and thrills when Lew just shuffles an arm up to give him space, shoves the arm around Dick’s shoulders.

“Yes, well,” Dick says, amazed at his own calm. “We can’t always be perfect.” It sounds sensible, like something his father would say.

“Yes you can.” Lew is staring at him now. Dick stares back and doesn’t ask what he means by that.

He does plan to do it again sometime soon though. Maybe in a couple of minutes, once his hands have stopped shaking.


End file.
